WSWS | One month ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the
525-page summary of its voluminous report on the torture of prisoners in
secret CIA facilities overseas, conducted between 2002 and 2007. In
grisly detail, the report documented such practices as waterboarding,
systematic beatings, and hitherto unknown tortures such as “rectal
feeding.” But in practice, the report has been buried, its evidence of
government criminality ignored, the perpetrators and organizers of
torture going scot-free.
As the World Socialist Web Site declared
at the time, “Two irrefutable conclusions flow from the release of the
Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture: 1) The United
States, during the Bush administration, committed criminal acts of the
most serious character, in violation of international and domestic law;
and 2) None of those responsible for these crimes will be arrested,
indicted or prosecuted for their actions.”
Far from being shamed or humiliated by the detailed exposure of their
criminality, those most implicated in the establishment and operation
of the torture chambers have brazenly defended their conduct. From
former Vice President Dick Cheney to ex-CIA directors George Tenet,
Michael Hayden and Porter Goss, to the operational head of the
interrogation program, Jose Rodriguez, they have displayed a
well-justified confidence that the Obama administration will protect
them from any consequences.
The Obama administration has officially shut down the secret CIA
prisons and adopted a policy of blowing up its enemies with drone-fired
missiles rather than capturing them. The shift from interrogation to
extermination has increased the number of innocent victims many-fold.
Whereas dozens of those jailed in CIA prisons were found to have no
connection to terrorism, the drone-missile strikes have killed thousands
of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.
Two recent incidents demonstrate the complicity of the Obama
administration with the torturers. On December 30, the outgoing chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, sent a
nine-page letter to the president outlining proposed legislative and
administrative actions to be taken on the basis of the torture report.
The changes were largely cosmetic, such as enacting into law the ban
on waterboarding and other forms of torture imposed by executive order
after Obama took office in 2009. Even these minimal legislative actions
will go nowhere in the new Republican-controlled Congress, and the
proposed administrative actions will be ignored by the
military-intelligence apparatus. The White House has not bothered to
respond to Feinstein’s letter.
In a statement issued January 5, the CIA announced that after four
years in office, the agency’s inspector-general, David Buckley, was
resigning, effective the end of the month, to “pursue an opportunity in
the private sector.” Buckley ran afoul of the CIA top brass with a
report last July acknowledging that five CIA operatives had penetrated
the computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers who
prepared the torture report, in an effort to find out how the Senate
panel had obtained certain CIA internal documents the agency had decided
to withhold from the committee that has legal oversight authority.
This electronic surveillance of the legislative branch was so
brazenly criminal that Senator Feinstein felt compelled to deliver a
one-hour address on the floor of the Senate last March denouncing the
agency’s actions. She charged that the agency “may well have violated
the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States
Constitution,” and also “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA
from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”
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